Blake's Reach

Jane Howard's position is established by her birth and by what she does about it. She is illegitimate and inherits nothing except her mother's appearance and the stubbornness attributed to the Blake family, so when the house's owner dies it is Jane who takes on the debt, and she funds the work out of smuggling on the Kent coast, which gives the novel both its economics and its criminal element. Anne Blake's death is what puts the house and its debts in front of Jane, and the smuggling along the Kent coast is the only route she has to paying them.

The arrival of Charles Blake, fleeing the French Revolution and expecting to inherit, is the arrival of a legitimate claim against everything she has built. That confrontation is the plot, and the smuggling background is what makes the stakes material rather than emotional, since the house is being paid for with money the authorities would confiscate if they knew about it. Charles comes home from revolutionary France expecting to inherit the house that Jane has spent years paying for, which sets a legal claim against all of that work.